Reuters investigation reveals id of road artist Banksy | EUROtoday

For a very long time, the id of the British road artist Banksy was within the twilight between secret and profitable advertising and marketing stunt. A analysis venture by the Reuters information company has now tried to supply journalistic help for assumptions which were held for years.

With two doable identities (and corresponding photographs) of their baggage – that of the frontman of the British trip-hop band “Massive Attack”, Robert Del Naja, and that of a sure Robin Gunningham, an artist from Bristol who the “Mail on Sunday” had already unmasked as Banksy in 2008 – three Reuters reporters traveled to the village of Horenka in Ukraine, the place Banksy artworks have been discovered on the surface partitions of bombed-out homes in late 2022 appeared. The reporters spoke with native residents, offered photographs and located that a minimum of Del Naja had traveled to Ukraine on the time.

However, on the finish of the analysis, which asks companions and managers like Steve Lazarides concerning the id of Banksy, it seems, based mostly on police reviews and courtroom recordsdata from September 2000, that the person who painted a Marc Jacobs poster on a New York skyscraper 26 years in the past as Banksy – and was arrested by the police there – is the mentioned Robin Gunningham. According to Reuters, Gunningham now lives underneath the title David Jones (“one of the most common names in Great Britain” and as a homage to the singer David Bowie, whose actual title was David Robert Jones) and is alleged to have entered Ukraine as this on the finish of 2022.

The FAZ additionally talked about the title Gunningham in November 2023 after a BBC interview from 2003 with Banksy resurfaced. In it, the BBC tradition correspondent on the time, Nigel Wrench, requested Banksy, who got here from Bristol in western England, whether or not he may additionally use his actual title. He says sure. He is requested if he’s Robert Banks, to which he appears to reply a minimum of half within the affirmative along with his reply, “It’s Robbie.” “Robin Banks” could be the title utilized by the Bristol artist Robin Gunningham.

However, nobody needed to verify the id of Robin Gunningham alias David Jones as road artist Banksy to Reuters. This is how the artwork supplier Robert Casterline is quoted, who claims to have photographed Banksy throughout the notorious Sotheby’s public sale in 2018, wherein his murals “Girl with Balloon”, which had simply been auctioned for 1.4 million {dollars}, was remodeled into “Love is in the Bin” by a shredder hidden within the body, which was then auctioned off in October 2021 for round 25 million {dollars}. Casterline, who shared solely a small portion of a photograph displaying a small portion of the bridge of a nostril and a pair of glasses with a built-in digital camera, says what just about everybody in Banksy’s inside circle says: “I don’t want to be the one to expose Banksy.”